Fic: No one is asking (so leave it alone), SPN, Sam/Dean, R
Title: No one is asking (so leave it alone)
Pairings/Characters: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word Count: 9,273
Spoilers: Up to 4.14
Summary: Everyone has their coping mechanisms. Sam’s getting everything under control, one step at a time.
Notes/Warnings: Incest, language, mention of teencest.
Disclaimer: Not mine, belongs to the WB et al. Title from “Cherry Tree” by the National.
*~*~*
Then
“There aren’t words. There is no forgetting. There is no making it better. Because it is right here, forever. You wouldn’t understand, and I could never make you understand, so I am sorry…” - Dean, on Hell, s04ep08
Now
Sam wakes up at six nineteen am. It is Monday, February, the sixteenth, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. The motel room is about as silent as motel rooms get, the pipes of the heater clanking and rattling like there are gremlins inside them and Dean is breathing, too soft to be a snore, but loud enough that Sam can hear it. A car goes by outside but doesn’t stop.
Sam watches Dean for a second. His brother drools in his sleep. Sam watches Dean for just another second and then slips out of bed and goes into his morning routine. They used to do the same drills that John taught them, every day without fail, but now their mornings look a little different. Sam does pushups and sit-ups and squats and other calisthenics until his muscles ache. He showers, washes his hair, shaves, gets dressed and goes for coffee. When he gets back Dean is out of bed about eighty percent of the time.
Every few mornings Dean will have showered. Maybe he’s shaved. Sometimes he’s dressed. He’s always been drinking.
Everyone has their coping mechanisms.
After Dean’s little speech about what Sam could or couldn’t understand about Hell, he thought about it, long and hard, and came to the conclusion that Dean was probably right. That once the physical body is gone it is virtually impossible to try and put into words the torments that can be visited upon a human soul. Forget flaying, or being a tree that can only speak through its wounds. Forget demons with pokers and whips. Forget circles and levels and eternally pushing stones up hills, and blah blah blah. The human mind is not designed to imagine what can be done to the soul.
But Dean was wrong about Sam not understanding.
Because Sam doesn’t have to imagine.
“C’mon, Dean,” Sam says, putting his brother’s coffee down on the table and starting the process of packing up what little shit they have. “It’s a brand new day, up and at ‘em.”
Dean is unshowered and unshaven but he’s up and he’s dressed. He grunts something that Sam supposes could mean just about anything. Thing is, Sam’s lived with this, with his father’s fight with the bottle, and now he can see it in his brother. He doesn’t have to smell Dean’s breath to know the drinking’s already started.
“Freaking early-morning freak of nature,” Dean grouses. He moves like an old man, stiff, like he’s been fighting and been beaten. If you spend an entire night with your muscles clenched up, it can happen. The dark circles under his eyes are hard to see in the mornings but only because the skin there is so puffy.
Sam hands him the coffee.
“Thanks,” Dean says, both hands wrapped around it, like he’s cold. He drinks without complaint, a froofy starbucks concoction laden with shots of espresso and chocolate and sugar, which means Sam was right and Dean needs the sugar and the caffeine more than he needs his pride.
Frankly, Sam’s just grateful Dean slept.
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up. He doesn’t jerk upright anymore. He just opens his eyes and his mouth is flooded with saliva, like he’s going to be sick, his skin is clammy with sweat, and he feels nauseous from a sense of foreboding. He makes himself look at the clock. It is six-thirty. It is Friday, February the twentieth, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. He is fine. Dean is fine. The motel room feels like a sauna, though the AC unit rattles along valiantly, and Dean’s breathing is too soft to be a snore, but it’s loud enough that Sam can hear it. He can hear a steady flow of traffic outside.
Sam watches Dean for a second. His brother groans unhappily in his sleep. Sam watches Dean for just another second and then slips out of bed and goes into his morning routine. Sam does pushups and sit-ups and squats and other calisthenics until his muscles ache. He showers, washes his hair, shaves, gets dressed and goes for coffee.
Everyone has their coping mechanisms.
*~*~*
“I love L.A.,” Dean says, rolling down the window. “How come we can’t have gigs here all the time?”
Considering it’s February and seventy-six degrees, Sam kind of agrees with him. Yeah, the traffic sucks serious balls, but at least it sucks serious balls in the sunshine. He feels lazy with it, stretched out across the passenger side of the seat, one arm across the back, elbow cocked so he doesn’t encroach on Dean’s bullet-proof bubble of personal space, window down. He’s not even wearing the eight layers he usually has to have on at all times to prevent freezing this time of year.
He doesn’t miss California like he used to, too much has happened now, and half the time Jessica and his time at Stanford don’t even feel real. He can’t tap into the furious desperation he felt after her death. Now he just feels wrung out; a little scared, a little desperate still, but, yeah, mostly just wrung out and bled dry. That, and angry. It’s an aching anger, one that sits rough in his guts every time he sees those angels.
All right, so maybe it is a furious desperation, but it’s different. He felt helpless before, caged and overwhelmed with mourning. But now there’s nothing to mourn. He can’t even think about the lives he and his brother never got to live, because the second Mary went up in flames that was it. He doesn’t know who they would be without the hunting and their histories. It’s incomprehensible.
He feels kind of bad about not missing Jess more; he loved her, but then he thinks about losing his Dad, losing Dean, and then losing Dean again, and losing Dean again. Every time he thinks he has his brother back something else comes along to take him away again.
Sam’s arm feels sticky against the leather of the seat, and he stretches it out all the way and, yeah, it’s in Dean’s space now, Sam can’t help it, he has long arms. Dean has full older-brother rights to make some comment about not making out with him at the drive-in movie unless Sam buys him dinner first, or about how Sam is the missing link between man and octopus. Or just to complain about the way that they’ve been on the road for just a little too long without a laundry run and Sam smells kind of ripe.
But he doesn’t. And the way Dean flinches just a tiny bit, just the smallest hitching of his shoulders, it’s fucked up.
This thing, the whole disaster of their lives, is really starting to screw Sam up. A few years ago he would have said that he was a pretty normal guy in a shitty situation. Now he’s wondering if, in his own unique way, he’s not as screwed up as his brother. And considering how screwed up Dean is, that’s really saying something. He has so much anger sloshing around in him, at a slow simmer at all times. And every thing that comes between him and Dean, from demons to arguments over whether they should stop for lunch, makes him…
Sam can’t even finish the thought. It’s not a good anger. It’s a jealous, possessive, tear the world down to get his way sort of anger. Mostly he tries to ignore it. Unfortunately, he’s had it one way or another all his life, from when he was a toddler throwing tantrums, to his surly teenage years, but he didn’t have the power to back himself up then. Back then, tearing everything down meant going to university, knowing full well what that would do to his family. Now he’s smart and strong and he has this power in him, like an invisible limb aching and atrophying from lack of use.
For a second, Sam can’t remember what he and Dean were talking about and the silence is getting weird. One of them needs to say something.
“You just want to bang another movie star,” Sam says absently, thumbing through the Journal with his other hand. He can’t remember the last time they even used it for more than a quick reference. The days when it was all they knew seem very far away.
He wonders what their dad would have to say about the way things are now. Demons on every corner, Dean on a mission from angels of God. He wonders if the old man would be proud of them. Sam thinks probably not. To be fair, Sam isn’t exactly proud of the way they’re coping either. It’s a clusterfuck, frankly.
For a second he misses his father intensely, but that might be more to do with missing the days when John’s dragging them pillar to post, two kids wondering if their father was coming home, watching Dean worry, and the drinking, and the shitty houses, and homework, and acne, and growing and growing and growing, were his biggest problems. He’d take that any day over this disaster.
The traffic is practically at a standstill. “Yeah, well,” Dean mutters, a beat off too, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He’s gone from being happy to pissed off in zero point two seconds and Sam holds in a sigh. He loves Dean, he does, but sometimes Dean doesn’t make it easy to love him without also wanting to smack him.
“You’re still mad about the Ruby thing?” Sam says, tracking their conversation back, horribly confused for a moment, and then, when he thinks he might get it, feeling sick and tired again. “Not that you’re on solid ground here, Dean.”
Dean turns his face very slightly away. “I’m not,” he says. “I don’t care.”
“Dude, you boned an angel, I think that might be worse.” Sam’s going for teasing, but Dean swallows hard and Sam thinks he might have missed the mark. It’s not that he slept with Ruby that’s bothering Dean, and they both know it. “Dean,” Sam says and his brother groans.
“We’re stuck in traffic, don’t get all emo on me, I can’t get away,” Dean says. “Just forget I said anything.”
“You didn’t say anything,” Sam says. He thinks about pointing out that of the millions of conversations they should be having but haven’t this is the one they have had. “We’re not, anymore,” he says quietly, because he thinks Dean needs to hear it. “You know that.”
“Okay,” Dean says. “Whatever.”
The sound of L.A. traffic and Alice Cooper combined aren’t enough to drown out the silence in the car. Sam stares at the Journal but doesn’t actually see any of the words.
They haven’t fucked since Dean came back.
Not Sam and Ruby, and not Sam and Dean either.
How do you explain that one to angels? Hi, I’m fucking a demon. Or maybe even better: So this one time my brother and I have been screwing around since we were teenagers, you don’t care if we keep doing that, right?
Yeah, right.
Sam tells himself it’s for the best.
It’s been such an on again off again sort of thing, mostly just fumbling in the dark. Dumb teenagers, too many hormones, too much time alone, too much lingering hero worship, too much of trying to hold on to the one thing that he had (and sometimes Sam wonders if it wasn’t a little bit of a “fuck you” to his father, too, to prove whose side Dean was really on, in the end), too much of never getting what he wanted except from Dean on his part, too much…whatever, on Dean’s. Rubbing off against each other, hands stuffed down the visual barrier of each other’s pants, the few, drunken blow-jobs Dean gave him. Then, stupid, stupid, stupid, doing it again when they’re grown-ass men, too old not to know better. When Sam was too tired, or drunk or fucked up to filter himself it used to happen, pushing Dean into the bathrooms of bars, and against the walls of cheap motels. Dean never starts it and even Sam isn’t too wrapped up in his own head to see how guilty his brother feels, but Sam does it because maybe “a normal guy in a shitty situation” isn’t totally true. They don’t look at each other straight on, they don’t look at what they’re doing. Sam used to think that…
What Sam used to think isn’t the point.
Whatever, he’s pop psychologied himself enough. After all the shit he’s had to deal with, he thinks wanting to fuck his own brother is so low on the list of Things Wrong in Sam Winchester’s Life.
They finally find a motel close to where rumours of a nasty haunting are coming from, and Sam’s first through the door, drops his bag on the nearest bed. “Dibs on the shower,” he says, rummaging through his bag to find his own shampoo and soap. He hates smelling like motel.
“Sure,” Dean says and tosses his bag onto a chair.
When Sam comes out, Dean is sitting on Sam’s bed, watching an old episode of ER with a young George Clooney, who Sam is pretty sure Dean has a mancrush on. Dean’s eating Cheetos from the vending machine. There are crumbs all over the bed. Sam doesn’t even know how Dean managed to get so many crumbs in such a wide radius. It doesn’t seem possible to do that just from eating.
“Dean,” Sam says, irritated. “I’m not sleeping on your mess.” He picks up his bag from where Dean’s dumped it on the floor and puts it on the other bed.
It’s not until after dinner, after they’ve talked about the possibility of their case not being a ghost, and after Dean’s pointed out the rack on the waitress, and Sam’s caught Dean drinking before bed, chugging from his flask as he brushes crumbs off his sheets, it’s not until they’ve called it a night and Sam’s pulling the covers up over himself that he realizes he got totally played. Like he hasn’t hunted alone for months at a time now, in that fucked up parallel world and now in this one. Like he can’t protect himself. Like Dean, isn’t a disaster waiting to happen. Because every time they actually, properly talk, Dean cracks open. And never mind that everything Sam said to Dean because of that stupid gender-confused siren was true: he’s bigger, and in better shape, and hasn’t been drinking. And never mind that Sam’s the one with the ability to exorcise demons with his fucking brain. Never mind that Dean’s already died so many times.
Dean is holding him back, because Dean’s always been that stupid type of self-sacrificing.
Doesn’t mean Sam loves him any less for it. It just makes him angry.
Sam wonders if he’s not getting unreasonably mad about this. It’s just a bed. It’s just habit. Sam lies wide awake, and slowly counts to ten, slowly unclenches his fists.
Dean wakes up in the middle of the night, not screaming, but sobbing. The kind that hurt like too many hiccoughs and sound like they’re being yanked out of him. He sounds like he can barely breathe but he’s up and moving, stumbling to the bathroom hand pressed over his mouth to silence himself, door snicking shut quietly behind him. The walls aren’t that thick. Sam can still hear it.
Sam gets out of bed. He’s tired, back of his eyes pricking sharply with lack of sleep, lashes gunky. He pushes open the bathroom door and leans against the door frame. Dean is huddled on the questionably clean floor in his shorts, wedged between the toilet and the tub, still breathing hard, but doing his best to stop. He has the light on and it makes Sam’s eyes hurt even more than they did before. Dean’s face is pink and flushed, and wet with tears. Sam thinks he’s seen that more in the past four years than he had in the past eighteen. If you’d asked when he was sixteen if his older brother ever cried he would have told you Dean’s tear ducts were broken. It makes him sick to his stomach to see Dean like this.
Sam takes a drink from the tap because his mouth is dry and tastes like old spit. When he looks back, Dean is doing his very best to pretend he’s not sitting on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night. He just looks sort of lost and confused.
“Musta sleptwalked,” Dean mumbles scrubbing his dace dry with his hand and arm when Sam’s head is turned. Dean’s never slept-walked in his whole life. “I’m fine,” he says. He swallows audibly, takes the hand Sam holds out and lets Sam haul him to his feet. Dean lets go, but Sam doesn’t, keeps on holding onto Dean. “It’s nothing,” Dean says. Under Sam’s fingers his pulse is too fast and he doesn’t try to pull his hand back.
Sam puts his other arm around Dean, pulling him tight against his body and they barely fit through the bathroom door like that but Dean’s bare shoulders are warm under his arm and his pulse is slowing.
“Get off me,” Dean says. “I said I walked in my sleep.”
Sam manhandles Dean onto his bed. “This is some bullshit right here,” Sam says. “Move over.” He doesn’t wait for Dean to comply before climbing in with him.
“Jesus, Sam,” Dean says, voice still rough. He shoves at Sam, harder than he needs to, but Sam grabs his forearm and his hip and bodily pushes Dean onto his side.
“Don’t,” Sam says, and Dean fights him, but not hard, and Sam has all the leverage.
The bed is too small for two grown men, but he curls around his brother, puts his back between the door and Dean, and after a minute or two Dean stops squirming and complaining. The gun under the pillow digs into Sam’s head and Dean is heavy on his right arm. It’s too hot under the blankets and Sam is already starting to sweat. He keeps his other arm wrapped around Dean, hand spread over Dean’s chest and shoulder where the scars from a shotgun full of rocksalt used to pock the skin.
“You don’t have to tell me more than you already have,” Sam says quietly, “but don’t pretend it’s nothing. It’s not nothing.” He doesn’t say he’s sorry. He probably should. He’s not sure he really knows how, and he’s not sure Dean would understand even if he could figure out a way to say it.
A truck rumbles by and Dean is solid against Sam’s body, but Sam knows how much of a lie that is. He holds on a little tighter.
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up and looks at the clock. It is six-sixteen. It is Saturday, February the twenty-first, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar and it’s not the endless cycle of Tuesdays that are the problem. He learned how to make Dean say new things, to disrupt him from the day after day of it. It’s not knowing when Tuesday will suddenly become Wednesday.
He and his brother are stuck together with sweat. It’s pretty disgusting. Dean is awake, Sam can tell, but he props himself up on one elbow and watches Dean for a second anyway. His brother squirms slightly and feigns sleep. Sam watches Dean for just another second and then slips out of bed and goes into his morning routine. Sam does pushups and sit-ups and squats and other calisthenics until his muscles ache. He showers, washes his hair, shaves, gets dressed and goes for coffee.
The good weather is gone. It’s bucketing rain down outside, a veritable deluge and Sam turns the collar of his coat up as he jogs to the car. It’s going to take forever, everyone drives like a total asshole in the rain.
“Hey,” he says to the first guy he sees coming out of Starbucks, little red cup in hand. “Can I have that?” The guy looks at him like he’s lost his mind. Sam grins awkwardly at him. “Never mind,” he says. “Just a…never mind.”
He calls Ruby while he’s in line for coffee.
“Not today,” he says. “I’ll call you as soon as we’ve got rid of this ghost. One grande coffee, one grande mocha, two extra shots of espresso and whipped cream.” Dean will bitch but he’ll drink it and like it. “Yeah, yeah, gimme a call when you can. Thanks, keep the change. Okay, Ruby, good luck.”
It’s part of the routine.
*~*~*
It’s not a ghost, it’s a harpy and its claws tear up Dean’s shoulder and back before they kill it. Sam douses the cuts in holy water and iodine and alcohol and stitches up his brother’s skin while Dean swears through clenched teeth and drinks too much whiskey. He went down in the mud and he tore the cuts wide open beating the harpy back with the butt of his shotgun. Sam was pretty sure there were very specific ways to kill a harpy, but Dean got up, and beat the thing into a bloody pulp. Then they used the special knife and the Latin and set the corpse on fire just to be sure. Dean’s pale from blood-loss and he’s not as happy as he usually is about the end of a hunt.
“That was pretty easy, right?” Dean says, slurred, as Sam bandages up his back and shoulder. “I took that bitch out no problem.”
“Yeah, Dean,” Sam says. “Sure. Except for the part where I’m stitching your back up, it went great.” If the harpy’s claws had gone a little deeper, if the cuts had run a little longer. If she’d raked him from the front. Sam knows what the inside of Dean’s body looks like. He’s seen it more than once. Sam swallows down bile. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“’S nothing,” Dean says. “Just a scratch. I’ll be good to go tomorrow, you don’t need to worry.”
“You should have waited!” Sam says. “I was right behind you, you didn’t need to rush in there like an idiot. Taking that thing on by yourself…You had nothing in that gun but rocksalt. What the hell were you thinking?”
Dean blinks at him. “Just a harpy,” he says, insistent. “Nothin’ I can’t handle.”
Sam gives up and goes and washes Dean’s blood off his hands. “Just go to sleep,” he snaps.
Dean doesn’t get up in the middle of the night, that night, but whatever relief Sam had is gone in the morning when Dean is hot with fever and he’s sweated the bed sheets translucent. The stitches are swollen and infected. Sam has to fill the bathtub with ice and put Dean in it while Dean, eyes fever-bright and tracking things that aren’t there, begs him to stop.
“I said I would do it,” Dean says. “I know what to do, you won’t be disappointed.”
He calls for Sam, repeats his name like a mantra and Sam holds his head between his hands and tries to make Dean see him. “Don’t take his face,” Dean says. “Don’t you fucking take his face.”
Sam pushes him down so nothing but his nose and mouth are out of the water and watches the ice melt as his hands go numb.
“I know what you want,” Dean says, when Sam has let him up, just a little because his hands hurt and Dean’s not struggling any more. Sam isn’t sure if Dean’s crying or laughing because his teeth are chattering so hard. Despite the harsh light of the bathroom his pupils are dilated so wide his eyes are almost completely black. “I’ll bring you Ruby back,” he says, low and almost flirtatious, “I’ll bring you her, and I know a girl who can hear angels talking. Let me out and I’ll bring you them both. He’s not a threat to Lilith, tell her that.” Sam tips more ice into the bathtub and eases Dean back down, cupping the freezing water and running it over Dean’s head. “You’re a liar,” Dean says. “No matter what he learns, even if he could crack her in two, he wouldn’t do this to me, I know you, I know what you really are.”
“Christo,” Sam says, and is honestly surprised that neither of them flinch.
*~*~*
On the second day, when Dean is still delirious and feverish, Sam draws chalk patterns on the ugly green carpet and summons Castiel.
No one comes.
He calls Ruby and gets nothing. Sam scrubs the carpet clean and draws different circles, lights different candles and summons Ruby.
She still doesn’t come.
Sam wraps Dean in icepacks and drives him to the hospital where he sits in an uncomfortable plastic chair and waits to find out if modern medicine and science will come through where both heaven and hell failed. He can think of a dozen philosophers who would find this funny.
Dean’s fever breaks in the night and the doctors tell Sam that it was touch and go but he’s out of the woods now. So long as he takes the full course of antibiotics he should be back to his usual self in no time. Sam falls asleep approximately five minutes later, still sitting in the uncomfortable plastic chair next to Dean’s bed, holding his sweaty hand.
On the third day while Dean is sleeping, Sam decides that he’s wasted too much time reacting instead of acting. And he’s really tired of things trying to take Dean away from him again. He’s aware that he’s starting to sound a little like a crazy person, but he figures it doesn’t matter so much since everything else around them is even stranger. Besides, it seems a little late to start worrying about that now. He’s pretty sure the tipping point was back on that Tuesday, or maybe it was Wednesday. Maybe it was the day Dean died for him, or the day John died for Dean.
Either way, they need to get a move on.
He thought he heard the words, “Mother really likes the show,” and “America’s Most Wanted,” out in the hallway. It’s not that Sam’s paranoid, it’s just that he’s sure there’s someone from the FBI watching them still. Some suit who saw the holes in the story and has their file sitting on his desk, while his friends tell him to give it up, that the Winchesters are finally dead, to let it go. Sam may or may not picture this guy as owning a fedora and a trenchcoat. But that’s not important. It is plausible, very possible in fact, that if they get sloppy, the FBI will pick them up again. Dean’s died once before, they had his body in their custody, escaping an explosion wouldn’t be so difficult. Sam is pretty sure that prison wouldn’t be a good place to prepare for an apocalypse. Plus, they don’t let family members share cells. Not that Sam’s thought this through.
Dean opens his eyes and mumbles, “You look like a foot.” He’s pale and exhausted-looking, but he’s awake.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Sam says, pretty sure he’s got the stupidest grin on his face. Dean tries to take his hand back, but Sam ignores him and keeps holding on. “C’mon, we’re getting the fuck out of here.”
He’s got nurse’s scrubs on and Dean’s in a wheelchair when one of the real staff stops Sam. “Mr. Lee,” she says, recognizing him. Kelly, Sam thinks her name is. She was the one who brought him coffee and a blanket that first night. She sounds confused and worried. “What are you doing?”
It doesn’t look good, Sam’s willing to admit that.
“Mr. Lee, your brother needs medical attention, please.” She’s short, maybe five three, probably less, and she’s a little overweight, hundred and forty, hundred and fifty. Sam really doesn’t want to have to hurt her. He doesn’t even want to have to frighten her, she was nice to him.
“Mr. Lee,” Kelly says firmly even though she looks scared. “I’m going to have to ask you to please come with me, so we can get your brother back to his room, or I’m going to call the police.”
Dean starts trying to get to his feet and Sam puts a hand on his shoulder and presses him back down. “You don’t want to call the police,” Sam says. He meant it to come out threatening, he’s a big guy, she’s afraid of him and that’s an advantage right now, even if their cover is so totally blown. It comes out a little different than he thought it was going to.
Her eyes get wide and unblinking. “No,” she says.
“You’re going to go back to work.”
“Yes,” she says and tears start slipping down her face. She isn’t pretty when she cries. A blotchy pink is rising into her cheeks and her nose starts to run. Sam’s pretty sure he’s hurting her.
“You aren’t ever going to talk about what happened here, are you? Not to anyone. Not even to write it down.”
“No,” Kelly says.
Sam leans over the nurse’s station and pulls a Kleenex out of the box. He presses it into her hand and starts walking again, pushing Dean out towards the exit. He doesn’t look back.
They peel out of town, Dean lying across the backseat, still in his hospital gown, blankets from their latest motel wrapped around him. Sam drives, one hand tight around the wheel, rear-view angled down so he can watch Dean. He’s pretty sure it’s illegal to talk on the phone in this state while you’re driving, but it’s against the law to do a lot of the things he does, and if they pull him over Sam figures that’s their problem, not his.
“Ruby,” he says. “I did it. Call me back when you get this.”
Dean is furious and silent. He’d started yelling the second they got into the car, and when Sam had told him to shut up, he’d said, “you gonna make me, Sammy?” and Sam said, “I might,” and Dean had looked at him like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to shout at him or cry again and shut up without another word. Sam’s hoping it’s the drugs still in Dean’s system because he never wants Dean to look at him like that. He never used to. Sam kind of blames their dad, and he kind of blames the angels. All these people, all these things trying to turn them against each other. Sam’ll be damned before that happens.
A couple hundred miles out of the city and Dean says, “Sammy.” He sounds tired. Sam decides they’ll stop once they’re a couple of states over, somewhere where they can regroup. “How long?” Dean asks.
“Just today,” Sam says. “Half of these things I can only do when I’m trying to save you.”
Dean goes very quiet and Sam thinks he’s fallen asleep, the rumble of the engine and CCR turned down low as good as a lullaby. “You ever think…Look, Sam…” he pushes himself into a sitting position, leaning over the seat so he can talk to Sam properly. “Ruby’s been so gung-ho to get you to use your powers, right? Said she couldn’t save me, but started teaching you to use them to kill Lilith the second I was…”
“Yeah,” Sam says. It’s not like Dean to actually want to talk about this stuff. In the mirror Dean’s still too pale and his eyes are red-rimmed, his lips chapped.
“You ever think that maybe whatever it is she wants, maybe they’ve been using me to get you to do it? We know she’s not working for Lilith, but…there’re a lot of demons, maybe some of them want different things. Like that one you shot in the basement, with the priest.”
Sam turns his head so he can look at Dean properly. The road is straight and mostly empty. The hospital gown shows a line of skin from the nape of Dean’s neck, down his back, over the bandage, down to the dip at the base of his spine, then falls open, spread over one leg.
“Eyes on the freaking road,” Dean says, flicking Sam’s ear.
“Maybe,” Sam says. If Ruby tries to double-cross him, not that he thinks she will, but if she does, he’ll rip her out of coma-girl and send her to hell and she knows it. She won’t double-cross him. The more she teaches him the less leverage she has to play them. Sam’s content to wait that one out. He still has Lilith’s pint-sized head to rip off her neck. “I think the FBI’s gonna be on us again,” he says, to distract his brother.
Dean flicks Sam’s ear again. “You shouldn’t have taken me to the hospital,” he says.
They’re going ninety-five miles an hour and Sam doesn’t slam the breaks on, but it’s near enough. The car fishtails and comes to a stop on the hard shoulder. He kneels up on the seat, hunched over facing backwards and fists his hands in the front of the hospital gown. “You could have died,” he snarls. “Again.”
“Dude,” Dean says, hands light on Sam’s wrists, “quit over-reacting.”
“I am not over-reacting,” Sam says. “Just listen to me for thirty seconds.”
Dean’s eyes are wide and unblinking. Sam watches as his eyes start to water and tears spill down his face. “Sam,” Dean says, low and pained.
It takes every ounce of self-control Sam has not to say something stupid that he’ll regret later. He only does it to save Dean. “Never mind,” Sam says and Dean sags a little.
The radiator in the car clicks and a mini-van passes them. Sam lets go of the hospital gown and Dean pulls the ends a little more closed at the back.
“I thought we could go to Texas,” Sam says.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Okay.”
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up and looks at the clock. It is seven-twenty-three. It is Wednesday.
It is Wednesday, March the fourth, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. He can hear water running, and Dean isn’t in his bed. Sam sits up, shoving the blankets off himself as Dean comes out of the shower.
“You’re up early,” Sam says, trying to pretend he’s not just standing in the middle of the room like an idiot.
Dean hitches his towel up but Sam can’t take his eyes off the scar on his shoulder. It’s flushed with blood and bright against his skin. The red right hand. “Figured since I’m finally up, I could get breakfast,” Dean says.
Sam’s routine is totally thrown off. It’s Wednesday. He can’t lose his routine on a Wednesday.
Sam watches Dean for a second and Dean’s shoulders go up just a little, uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “It’s not a big deal, I’ll get breakfast, you shower, we’ll hit the road…” Dean reaches out and awkwardly pats Sam on the arm. “Okay, Sammy?” he says. “Sam.”
For just a second, when Dean’s hand is touching Sam’s skin, Sam is overwhelmed with the impression of noise. When Dean turns away to get dressed, Sam’s brain begins to work out what it was. Usefulicanbeusefuluselessworthsomethingicanbegoodicanbeicanbefasterstrongersmarterbetterworthlessnotworthless
Sam feels like his heart is trying to kick out of his chest. Fucking Wednesdays.
What he wants to say is: “You’re not going fucking anywhere without me,” and while Dean’s been resting and watching day-time TV, Sam’s been out on the town with Ruby, making people do what he says. But that would be a bad idea for a number of reasons. One, he’s gone down that road before, and it’s not a healthy one. Two, people don’t like to do what Sam says, not like Andy. Until Sam’s learned to ease up a bit, he’s pretty sure that what he does really doesn’t feel good for the person he’s doing it to. Three, the last thing he wants is Dean freaking out on him again. “Thanks,” he says instead, though it comes out like a croak. “Coffee would be good.”
He stands under the shower, one hand on the tiles, one hand on his dick, trying to jerk off. He’s trying for the numbing random images and the white noise of orgasm. He’s half hard from friction but his brain keeps looping back to Dean.
Dean who doesn’t know him any more. The wretched loop of Dean’s thoughts. Dean who has locked down again because of the stupid shit Sam said to him. Jesus Christ can he read minds now? Dean in the bathtub who thought he was Alastair. Dean dying. Dean dying. Dean dying.
Sam gives up on trying to jerk off.
He washes his hair. He shaves. His hands are steady even though they feel like they ought to be shaking.
Castiel is standing a little too close to the bathroom door when Sam comes out of his shower and the angel gets a faceful of steam. Sam absolutely does not gut-reaction slam Castiel up against the wall with an arm over his throat, losing his towel in the process before realizing who it is.
“Sorry,” Sam mutters, putting his towel back on. “Dean’s out.”
Castiel looks at the motel room. “I can see that,” he says. “You summoned me?”
Sam pulls boxers on because it’s weird talking to an angel in a towel. “That was over a week ago!” Sam says. They’re in Texas, in a town with a population of under a thousand, letting Dean finish healing in the sunshine. “Dean nearly died.”
“He didn’t and I was busy,” Castiel says. “And I find your arrogance annoying. What do you want?”
“I’m not the anti-Christ, am I?” Sam asks.
Castiel’s shoulders move in a way that isn’t a shrug. It’s more like he’s settling something that isn’t visible. “Probably not,” he says with his odd little half-smile. “That would make this, as Dean says, awkward.”
Sam barks out a laugh. “Anyone ever tell you you’re lousy at reassuring people?” He puts on jeans and a t-shirt too because it’s also weird talking to an angel in your underwear. Sam sighs and turns back to look at Castiel again. “You’re not going to put my brother back in the Pit,” Sam says, “not really.”
“I could,” Castiel says, but he looks a little cagey.
He’s a lot taller than Castiel, a lot broader in the shoulder, and he uses that, gets up into Castiel’s space, just a little. Smiles at the angel like they’re friends. Castiel is no Anna, but he’s no Uriel either and Sam kind of knows what that’s like, this indecision, this ledge to fall from. He’s not who he was and he’s not the Boy King either, but falling is a lot easier than the alternatives and say what you will about the darkside, but it takes care of its business. He thinks Castiel knows that too.
“Yeah,” Sam says, “but you’re not going to.” Sam steps back and returns to tidying up. “Dean was wrong, you’re not ‘junkless’ are you? I mean, you inhabit human bodies, for one.”
Now Castiel just looks confused. “What does that have to do with Hell?”
“Says in the Bible that angels had sex with humans,” Sam says, not answering the question. See how Castiel likes it when other people refuse to give a straight answer.
“Some,” Castiel says. “A long time ago.”
“I didn’t figure you had,” Sam says. “I’ve worn polyester. So what’s up with all that other stuff?”
Castiel blinks at him. “What?” he says.
Sam shrugs and pretends like his heart isn’t about to jackhammer out of his chest. “If I have sex with Dean, are you going to punish him for it?”
It’s out now and Sam thought it would be easier to breathe once he’d said it, but it’s worse, if anything. Castiel tips his head to one side and really looks at Sam. “Oh,” he says. “That.”
Sam didn’t think there could be anything more embarrassing than Dean giving him The Talk when he was twelve. Then he’d had co-ed sex education when he was thirteen and he thought that was as bad as it could get. Until John tried to give him The Talk when he was fifteen and he’d already started fooling around with one of the girls in his homeroom, and with Dean. He thought there really couldn’t be anything much worse than that. Until he tried to have The Talk with a freaking angel.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “That.”
He doesn’t know what the angels see when they look at him, with his selfishness, and his demon blood, and his psychic powers, and this love for his brother that is wrapped around his bones, that is hooked into every organ and won’t let go. He used to think it was like cancer, or a parasite inside him, but that’s not right. It’s not foreign, it’s not wrong. It’s just…
He doesn’t think the angels could like him much less. He’s not sure he blames them any more. It’s not in their nature to understand things, they don’t have questions to begin with.
Now that he knows what’s out there and what he can do, Sam wonders what would happen if Castiel did throw Dean back into the Pit, or if some case gone wrong took Dean from him and he wound up back there. The thing inside him that loves Dean too much wonders if the next time he loses Dean he might not go further than a soul for a soul. If Hell won’t trade with him, and Heaven won’t have him and he can’t, he can’t lose Dean again…
Forty years already, forty years and they had Dean off the rack and on his way to becoming one of them. Sam wonders how well his powers would work on angels. If maybe he could make deals with them. If he could rip them out of their hosts and send them back to Heaven. He wonders what happens if you learn to pull their Grace right out of them, if you can saw off their wings and make them fall.
He wonders if that’s what Castiel means when he said, “Probably not,” if this is all just some sort of fucked up lynchpin.
“Incest,” Sam prompts, when Castiel doesn’t say anything. “Gay incest. How’s that sit with you and the man upstairs?”
Castiel sighs. “Samuel,” he says. “There are more important things at stake here.”
“Yes or no,” Sam snaps. “Can’t you just answer the fucking question? Or would that spoil it for you?”
“You are very much your father’s son,” Castiel says and Sam can’t tell if he’s talking about John or about Azazael. He sighs again. “I never met it, but there are others who remember before it started to question. When God loved Lucifer the most, before the Fall. Love that divides and breaks everything around it.”
“Yes or no,” Sam says, stubborn.
“We aren’t made for that kind of love. We know other kinds, but not like what humans know. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that’s what the Accuser found.” Castiel looks away, looks regretful and tired all of a sudden. “Go to your brother, if you want. I would not punish either of you for that.”
Sam sits down hard on the bed and starts to laugh. “Don’t use my powers to save people, but I can fuck my brother?” he chokes out. “You have some screwed up priorities, you know that?”
The door opens and Dean stands in the doorway with a McDonalds bag tucked under his arm, juggling it and a tray of coffee, and the key to the room. Castiel is gone and Sam is sitting on his own, laughing.
“You okay?” Dean asks, toeing the door shut behind him. He puts their breakfast down on the table and hovers. “Seriously, man, what’s up?”
Sam looks up at Dean, then gets up and crowds his brother up against the off-white of the motel wall and kisses him. Dean’s eyes get wide and startled and he jerks against Sam’s body. They don’t do this. But Sam wants it with everything possessive, jealous, and too used to getting his own way he has in him. And he wants it with all the helpless love he has for the older brother who carried him out of two fires, and tried so hard to raise him, and loves him back even at the worst of times.
Dean turns his face away and Sam catches his head between his hands and makes him look. “Say no because you mean it,” Sam says. “Because I’ve already cleared it with Castiel.”
“No,” Dean says and walks right back out the door again.
Sam hears the engine start and the slight skid and screech of tyres as Dean drives off too fast. He’ll be back. Maybe Sam will even have stopped laughing by then.
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up and looks at the clock. It is five thirty-eight in the morning. It is Thursday the fifth of March, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. Sam is alone in the motel room, but he can hear the rumble of the Impala outside, and the light beaming through the thin curtains cuts off at the same time as the engine.
Dean comes in, shoulders up, head down and looks at Sam sideways, hovering near the door. He waits until Sam’s sat up to speak, but still won’t look at him properly. “You never wanted that before,” he says.
Sam puts his bare feet on the floor, elbows on his knees. Non-threatening. It’s dark in the room except for the light coming through the curtains from the neon sign of the motel and the lone streetlight. “Says who?” Sam keeps his voice quiet. “And what does that matter anyway?”
“You didn’t,” Dean insists.
“I was a teenager,” Sam says and carries right on over Dean’s wince, “of course I wanted more. But what that has to do with us, now, I don’t get. This isn’t a sign of anything, Dean. This is just….”
“This is just fucked up,” Dean says, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “You know it is.”
Sam stands up and this time Dean doesn’t move. “Castiel didn’t think so,” Sam points out. Love that divides and breaks everything around it, Castiel said. And maybe Sam should be steering clear of sympathy for the devil, but it’s not like everyone hasn’t already picked sides and Sam can think of a few things he’d like to break.
“Yeah, well,” Dean says. “You can’t tell me it’s a good idea.”
“What are you scared of?” Sam asks and okay, maybe he does deserve to be laughed at then. Dean stops though when Sam crosses the room to stand in front of him.
Dean takes Sam’s face in his hands and kisses him hesitantly. Not exactly like Sam would expect his brother to kiss someone, unless that someone was your first girlfriend when you were thirteen and you had strict Christian parents and...It’s pretty feeble, is what Sam’s saying. “You don’t have to save me,” Dean says. “I’m right here.”
Sam puts one hand on Dean’s jaw and kisses him properly, licking into his mouth, and Dean gets with the program. He tastes like whiskey and Sam can hear Usefulicanbeusefuluselessworthsomethingicanbegoodicanstopthisicansaveusicanbeworthlessnotworthless
There is every chance that Dean is giving Sam this out of some misguided attempt to save Sam from the Dark Side. Or because he thinks Castiel told him to. Or because of some other insane ass-backwards logic. Sam doesn’t think so though.
And when Dean’s kneeling astride Sam, squirming on his dick while Sam holds him still, just rocking up into him, slow, and Dean’s cursing, sweat-slippery and panting, Sam hears something different in Dean’s head. Mostly it’s his name, and Sam doesn’t get thoughts, not really, just impressions. It’s an overwhelming mix of devotion, love and the feeling of getting fucked, hard.
“Fuck,” Sam says and urges Dean into motion again, shoving his hips up as Dean rides him. “Jesus, Dean, that’s good.”
Dean lights up, just a little, the hum of his thoughts still on a loop, but it’s an oddly peaceful one, not the depressing feedback Sam was picking up before. If he’s feeling a little smug about his own abilities in bed, Sam figures that’s okay. If he’d known how easily so many of their problems could be solved this way, he would have had Dean bent over the nearest surface the first day he came back from Hell.
*~*~*
Sam has a really weird dream about being on a pirate ship with the cast of Fraggle Rock and wakes up feeling disorientated.
Dean sits propped up in bed eating Doritos, getting crumbs everywhere, including on Sam, which wouldn’t be the case if he would chew with his mouth a little more shut. He takes another sip of the beer in his hand and licks his fingers clean before tossing the empty bag of chips towards the garbage can. His aim is shot from not really caring and not really looking, so of course he misses and it winds up on the floor, but there are already takeout containers there to keep it company.
In contrast, Dean’s clothes are neatly folded on the old wingback chair with one wobbly leg and rat-chewed upholstery and his guns have already been cleaned and put away again. There’s a smear of orange powder at the corner of Dean’s mouth and Sam wonders how long it will be there before Dean wipes it away. He surreptitiously checks the clock on the nightstand. It says 5:11 and Sam is fairly certain that it’s not five anything, am or pm but it flips over to 5:12 and he figures he can still time Dean’s reaction. He thinks it’s more like ten in the morning. Maybe noon. The ratty brown curtains are still drawn, which makes it hard to tell.
Dean sets the bottle down too, drained to a thin rim of foam at the very bottom. There’s half a sixpack empted out already. Sam decides to make Dean’s drinking his next project. It can go hand in hand with him making his brother a happier person with the power of his dick. It’s like winning all the little arguments they’ve had these past few weeks all at once. Sam yawns contentedly and stretches, back popping. He feels awesome. Still a little rubbery around the knees, but pretty awesome. It’s really hard not to look as smug as he feels.
“So,” Dean says, wiping his fingers on the thin, bluish sheets. “We should probably pick up a newspaper, or something.”
Sam scratches his stomach and stares up at the water-stain on the ceiling. It’s shaped a little like Montana. “You still need to rest,” he says. Especially since they were rough on his cuts and one of them seeped a little blood. “We should stay here for a few days at least.” The motel they’re holed up in is kind of a roach trap but the bed has a decent enough mattress, and there’s a shitty bar and a halfway decent diner across the street.
Dean’s face closes up and his shoulders tense and for a second Sam feels like Dean is all the way across the room, even though they’re hip to hip, naked in the same bed. “Come on, Sam, people to save, monsters to kill,” Dean says, casually, like it doesn’t matter. Sam puts his hand on Dean’s thigh, high up where he can feel Dean’s pulse.
“Dude,” Dean says, head dropping back, smirking. There’s no way Dean’s getting it up again, not so soon after last time, but Sam needs a few days to regroup before he can think about what the heck they’re going to do now. Exactly how they’re going to finish the crap that everyone else started. He slides Dean down the bed, onto his back and hooks Dean’s leg over his arm so he can push three fingers into him. They go easily, riding on lube and come and Dean shudders and groans, clutching at Sam’s shoulder.
“Jesus Christ, Sammy,” Dean says and the next sound out of his mouth is an honest-to-god whimper that Sam decides he won’t rib Dean about later. It’s the easiest way Sam can think of to distract Dean and just because Dean can’t get it up right now doesn’t mean that Sam’s not willing to give it the old college try. He twists his fingers and Dean shudders again, biting at his lips.
Sam doesn’t want Dean thinking about demons or ghosts or any other thing, just him, just them. He licks the smear of orange off Dean’s face and thinks, abruptly irritated, that Heaven and Hell can have someone else. Someone who the world doesn’t need. Someone who isn’t his. Dean isn’t anyone’s pawn, and he doesn’t appreciate people trying to fuck with them.
Sam falls asleep after and he dreams of demons, nothing but demons as far as he can see and Dean’s eyes the only colour for miles around. Dean blinks black and Sam wakes up gasping for breath with his face mashed into a pillow that smells like sweat and Dean’s spit and he just knows he’s going to have lines on his face. There’s something warm resting on his back, over the scar, and he realizes Dean’s already up, propped back against the headboard, one hand on Sam. He has a newspaper in his lap and a red pen that he’s tapping on his teeth with his other hand. There are three obituaries and a missing persons ad circled. It’s around four-thirty, in time to grab what’s either a really late lunch or a really early dinner.
“Hey,” Dean says as Sam sits up. Sam thinks he sounds pretty chipper for a guy who, a few hours ago, couldn’t say anything but his brother’s name, and only that in fucked out whimpers. He thinks Dean might be sitting funny, but it’s not much consolation. “I think I found a few leads,” Dean says. He’s showered, shaved, dressed…he even has socks on. “Looks like a werewolf in Oregon or an undine in Florida.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, though he doesn’t mean it. “Okay. Oregon.” If they can figure out who the werewolf is, they can take it out while it’s human, then Sam won’t have to worry about anyone getting infected, or hurt. Plus, no risk of drowning or being eaten by an alligator, or a misplaced golf-ball from some old codger hitting Dean in the wrong place…
He’s going to need a new routine, Sam thinks. Just something that can tide them over until he kills Lilith.
End.
*~*~*
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire,
Belike through impotence or unaware,
To give his enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger whom his anger saves
To punish endless? 'Wherefore cease we, then?'
Say they who counsel war; 'we are decreed,
Reserved, and destined to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse?' Is this, then, worst--
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
What when we fled amain, pursued and struck
With Heaven's afflicting thunder, and besought
The Deep to shelter us? This Hell then seemed
A refuge from those wounds. Or when we lay
Chained on the burning lake? That sure was worse.
What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,
Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage,
And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us?
- Paradise Lost Book II
Pairings/Characters: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word Count: 9,273
Spoilers: Up to 4.14
Summary: Everyone has their coping mechanisms. Sam’s getting everything under control, one step at a time.
Notes/Warnings: Incest, language, mention of teencest.
Disclaimer: Not mine, belongs to the WB et al. Title from “Cherry Tree” by the National.
*~*~*
Then
“There aren’t words. There is no forgetting. There is no making it better. Because it is right here, forever. You wouldn’t understand, and I could never make you understand, so I am sorry…” - Dean, on Hell, s04ep08
Now
Sam wakes up at six nineteen am. It is Monday, February, the sixteenth, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. The motel room is about as silent as motel rooms get, the pipes of the heater clanking and rattling like there are gremlins inside them and Dean is breathing, too soft to be a snore, but loud enough that Sam can hear it. A car goes by outside but doesn’t stop.
Sam watches Dean for a second. His brother drools in his sleep. Sam watches Dean for just another second and then slips out of bed and goes into his morning routine. They used to do the same drills that John taught them, every day without fail, but now their mornings look a little different. Sam does pushups and sit-ups and squats and other calisthenics until his muscles ache. He showers, washes his hair, shaves, gets dressed and goes for coffee. When he gets back Dean is out of bed about eighty percent of the time.
Every few mornings Dean will have showered. Maybe he’s shaved. Sometimes he’s dressed. He’s always been drinking.
Everyone has their coping mechanisms.
After Dean’s little speech about what Sam could or couldn’t understand about Hell, he thought about it, long and hard, and came to the conclusion that Dean was probably right. That once the physical body is gone it is virtually impossible to try and put into words the torments that can be visited upon a human soul. Forget flaying, or being a tree that can only speak through its wounds. Forget demons with pokers and whips. Forget circles and levels and eternally pushing stones up hills, and blah blah blah. The human mind is not designed to imagine what can be done to the soul.
But Dean was wrong about Sam not understanding.
Because Sam doesn’t have to imagine.
“C’mon, Dean,” Sam says, putting his brother’s coffee down on the table and starting the process of packing up what little shit they have. “It’s a brand new day, up and at ‘em.”
Dean is unshowered and unshaven but he’s up and he’s dressed. He grunts something that Sam supposes could mean just about anything. Thing is, Sam’s lived with this, with his father’s fight with the bottle, and now he can see it in his brother. He doesn’t have to smell Dean’s breath to know the drinking’s already started.
“Freaking early-morning freak of nature,” Dean grouses. He moves like an old man, stiff, like he’s been fighting and been beaten. If you spend an entire night with your muscles clenched up, it can happen. The dark circles under his eyes are hard to see in the mornings but only because the skin there is so puffy.
Sam hands him the coffee.
“Thanks,” Dean says, both hands wrapped around it, like he’s cold. He drinks without complaint, a froofy starbucks concoction laden with shots of espresso and chocolate and sugar, which means Sam was right and Dean needs the sugar and the caffeine more than he needs his pride.
Frankly, Sam’s just grateful Dean slept.
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up. He doesn’t jerk upright anymore. He just opens his eyes and his mouth is flooded with saliva, like he’s going to be sick, his skin is clammy with sweat, and he feels nauseous from a sense of foreboding. He makes himself look at the clock. It is six-thirty. It is Friday, February the twentieth, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. He is fine. Dean is fine. The motel room feels like a sauna, though the AC unit rattles along valiantly, and Dean’s breathing is too soft to be a snore, but it’s loud enough that Sam can hear it. He can hear a steady flow of traffic outside.
Sam watches Dean for a second. His brother groans unhappily in his sleep. Sam watches Dean for just another second and then slips out of bed and goes into his morning routine. Sam does pushups and sit-ups and squats and other calisthenics until his muscles ache. He showers, washes his hair, shaves, gets dressed and goes for coffee.
Everyone has their coping mechanisms.
*~*~*
“I love L.A.,” Dean says, rolling down the window. “How come we can’t have gigs here all the time?”
Considering it’s February and seventy-six degrees, Sam kind of agrees with him. Yeah, the traffic sucks serious balls, but at least it sucks serious balls in the sunshine. He feels lazy with it, stretched out across the passenger side of the seat, one arm across the back, elbow cocked so he doesn’t encroach on Dean’s bullet-proof bubble of personal space, window down. He’s not even wearing the eight layers he usually has to have on at all times to prevent freezing this time of year.
He doesn’t miss California like he used to, too much has happened now, and half the time Jessica and his time at Stanford don’t even feel real. He can’t tap into the furious desperation he felt after her death. Now he just feels wrung out; a little scared, a little desperate still, but, yeah, mostly just wrung out and bled dry. That, and angry. It’s an aching anger, one that sits rough in his guts every time he sees those angels.
All right, so maybe it is a furious desperation, but it’s different. He felt helpless before, caged and overwhelmed with mourning. But now there’s nothing to mourn. He can’t even think about the lives he and his brother never got to live, because the second Mary went up in flames that was it. He doesn’t know who they would be without the hunting and their histories. It’s incomprehensible.
He feels kind of bad about not missing Jess more; he loved her, but then he thinks about losing his Dad, losing Dean, and then losing Dean again, and losing Dean again. Every time he thinks he has his brother back something else comes along to take him away again.
Sam’s arm feels sticky against the leather of the seat, and he stretches it out all the way and, yeah, it’s in Dean’s space now, Sam can’t help it, he has long arms. Dean has full older-brother rights to make some comment about not making out with him at the drive-in movie unless Sam buys him dinner first, or about how Sam is the missing link between man and octopus. Or just to complain about the way that they’ve been on the road for just a little too long without a laundry run and Sam smells kind of ripe.
But he doesn’t. And the way Dean flinches just a tiny bit, just the smallest hitching of his shoulders, it’s fucked up.
This thing, the whole disaster of their lives, is really starting to screw Sam up. A few years ago he would have said that he was a pretty normal guy in a shitty situation. Now he’s wondering if, in his own unique way, he’s not as screwed up as his brother. And considering how screwed up Dean is, that’s really saying something. He has so much anger sloshing around in him, at a slow simmer at all times. And every thing that comes between him and Dean, from demons to arguments over whether they should stop for lunch, makes him…
Sam can’t even finish the thought. It’s not a good anger. It’s a jealous, possessive, tear the world down to get his way sort of anger. Mostly he tries to ignore it. Unfortunately, he’s had it one way or another all his life, from when he was a toddler throwing tantrums, to his surly teenage years, but he didn’t have the power to back himself up then. Back then, tearing everything down meant going to university, knowing full well what that would do to his family. Now he’s smart and strong and he has this power in him, like an invisible limb aching and atrophying from lack of use.
For a second, Sam can’t remember what he and Dean were talking about and the silence is getting weird. One of them needs to say something.
“You just want to bang another movie star,” Sam says absently, thumbing through the Journal with his other hand. He can’t remember the last time they even used it for more than a quick reference. The days when it was all they knew seem very far away.
He wonders what their dad would have to say about the way things are now. Demons on every corner, Dean on a mission from angels of God. He wonders if the old man would be proud of them. Sam thinks probably not. To be fair, Sam isn’t exactly proud of the way they’re coping either. It’s a clusterfuck, frankly.
For a second he misses his father intensely, but that might be more to do with missing the days when John’s dragging them pillar to post, two kids wondering if their father was coming home, watching Dean worry, and the drinking, and the shitty houses, and homework, and acne, and growing and growing and growing, were his biggest problems. He’d take that any day over this disaster.
The traffic is practically at a standstill. “Yeah, well,” Dean mutters, a beat off too, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He’s gone from being happy to pissed off in zero point two seconds and Sam holds in a sigh. He loves Dean, he does, but sometimes Dean doesn’t make it easy to love him without also wanting to smack him.
“You’re still mad about the Ruby thing?” Sam says, tracking their conversation back, horribly confused for a moment, and then, when he thinks he might get it, feeling sick and tired again. “Not that you’re on solid ground here, Dean.”
Dean turns his face very slightly away. “I’m not,” he says. “I don’t care.”
“Dude, you boned an angel, I think that might be worse.” Sam’s going for teasing, but Dean swallows hard and Sam thinks he might have missed the mark. It’s not that he slept with Ruby that’s bothering Dean, and they both know it. “Dean,” Sam says and his brother groans.
“We’re stuck in traffic, don’t get all emo on me, I can’t get away,” Dean says. “Just forget I said anything.”
“You didn’t say anything,” Sam says. He thinks about pointing out that of the millions of conversations they should be having but haven’t this is the one they have had. “We’re not, anymore,” he says quietly, because he thinks Dean needs to hear it. “You know that.”
“Okay,” Dean says. “Whatever.”
The sound of L.A. traffic and Alice Cooper combined aren’t enough to drown out the silence in the car. Sam stares at the Journal but doesn’t actually see any of the words.
They haven’t fucked since Dean came back.
Not Sam and Ruby, and not Sam and Dean either.
How do you explain that one to angels? Hi, I’m fucking a demon. Or maybe even better: So this one time my brother and I have been screwing around since we were teenagers, you don’t care if we keep doing that, right?
Yeah, right.
Sam tells himself it’s for the best.
It’s been such an on again off again sort of thing, mostly just fumbling in the dark. Dumb teenagers, too many hormones, too much time alone, too much lingering hero worship, too much of trying to hold on to the one thing that he had (and sometimes Sam wonders if it wasn’t a little bit of a “fuck you” to his father, too, to prove whose side Dean was really on, in the end), too much of never getting what he wanted except from Dean on his part, too much…whatever, on Dean’s. Rubbing off against each other, hands stuffed down the visual barrier of each other’s pants, the few, drunken blow-jobs Dean gave him. Then, stupid, stupid, stupid, doing it again when they’re grown-ass men, too old not to know better. When Sam was too tired, or drunk or fucked up to filter himself it used to happen, pushing Dean into the bathrooms of bars, and against the walls of cheap motels. Dean never starts it and even Sam isn’t too wrapped up in his own head to see how guilty his brother feels, but Sam does it because maybe “a normal guy in a shitty situation” isn’t totally true. They don’t look at each other straight on, they don’t look at what they’re doing. Sam used to think that…
What Sam used to think isn’t the point.
Whatever, he’s pop psychologied himself enough. After all the shit he’s had to deal with, he thinks wanting to fuck his own brother is so low on the list of Things Wrong in Sam Winchester’s Life.
They finally find a motel close to where rumours of a nasty haunting are coming from, and Sam’s first through the door, drops his bag on the nearest bed. “Dibs on the shower,” he says, rummaging through his bag to find his own shampoo and soap. He hates smelling like motel.
“Sure,” Dean says and tosses his bag onto a chair.
When Sam comes out, Dean is sitting on Sam’s bed, watching an old episode of ER with a young George Clooney, who Sam is pretty sure Dean has a mancrush on. Dean’s eating Cheetos from the vending machine. There are crumbs all over the bed. Sam doesn’t even know how Dean managed to get so many crumbs in such a wide radius. It doesn’t seem possible to do that just from eating.
“Dean,” Sam says, irritated. “I’m not sleeping on your mess.” He picks up his bag from where Dean’s dumped it on the floor and puts it on the other bed.
It’s not until after dinner, after they’ve talked about the possibility of their case not being a ghost, and after Dean’s pointed out the rack on the waitress, and Sam’s caught Dean drinking before bed, chugging from his flask as he brushes crumbs off his sheets, it’s not until they’ve called it a night and Sam’s pulling the covers up over himself that he realizes he got totally played. Like he hasn’t hunted alone for months at a time now, in that fucked up parallel world and now in this one. Like he can’t protect himself. Like Dean, isn’t a disaster waiting to happen. Because every time they actually, properly talk, Dean cracks open. And never mind that everything Sam said to Dean because of that stupid gender-confused siren was true: he’s bigger, and in better shape, and hasn’t been drinking. And never mind that Sam’s the one with the ability to exorcise demons with his fucking brain. Never mind that Dean’s already died so many times.
Dean is holding him back, because Dean’s always been that stupid type of self-sacrificing.
Doesn’t mean Sam loves him any less for it. It just makes him angry.
Sam wonders if he’s not getting unreasonably mad about this. It’s just a bed. It’s just habit. Sam lies wide awake, and slowly counts to ten, slowly unclenches his fists.
Dean wakes up in the middle of the night, not screaming, but sobbing. The kind that hurt like too many hiccoughs and sound like they’re being yanked out of him. He sounds like he can barely breathe but he’s up and moving, stumbling to the bathroom hand pressed over his mouth to silence himself, door snicking shut quietly behind him. The walls aren’t that thick. Sam can still hear it.
Sam gets out of bed. He’s tired, back of his eyes pricking sharply with lack of sleep, lashes gunky. He pushes open the bathroom door and leans against the door frame. Dean is huddled on the questionably clean floor in his shorts, wedged between the toilet and the tub, still breathing hard, but doing his best to stop. He has the light on and it makes Sam’s eyes hurt even more than they did before. Dean’s face is pink and flushed, and wet with tears. Sam thinks he’s seen that more in the past four years than he had in the past eighteen. If you’d asked when he was sixteen if his older brother ever cried he would have told you Dean’s tear ducts were broken. It makes him sick to his stomach to see Dean like this.
Sam takes a drink from the tap because his mouth is dry and tastes like old spit. When he looks back, Dean is doing his very best to pretend he’s not sitting on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night. He just looks sort of lost and confused.
“Musta sleptwalked,” Dean mumbles scrubbing his dace dry with his hand and arm when Sam’s head is turned. Dean’s never slept-walked in his whole life. “I’m fine,” he says. He swallows audibly, takes the hand Sam holds out and lets Sam haul him to his feet. Dean lets go, but Sam doesn’t, keeps on holding onto Dean. “It’s nothing,” Dean says. Under Sam’s fingers his pulse is too fast and he doesn’t try to pull his hand back.
Sam puts his other arm around Dean, pulling him tight against his body and they barely fit through the bathroom door like that but Dean’s bare shoulders are warm under his arm and his pulse is slowing.
“Get off me,” Dean says. “I said I walked in my sleep.”
Sam manhandles Dean onto his bed. “This is some bullshit right here,” Sam says. “Move over.” He doesn’t wait for Dean to comply before climbing in with him.
“Jesus, Sam,” Dean says, voice still rough. He shoves at Sam, harder than he needs to, but Sam grabs his forearm and his hip and bodily pushes Dean onto his side.
“Don’t,” Sam says, and Dean fights him, but not hard, and Sam has all the leverage.
The bed is too small for two grown men, but he curls around his brother, puts his back between the door and Dean, and after a minute or two Dean stops squirming and complaining. The gun under the pillow digs into Sam’s head and Dean is heavy on his right arm. It’s too hot under the blankets and Sam is already starting to sweat. He keeps his other arm wrapped around Dean, hand spread over Dean’s chest and shoulder where the scars from a shotgun full of rocksalt used to pock the skin.
“You don’t have to tell me more than you already have,” Sam says quietly, “but don’t pretend it’s nothing. It’s not nothing.” He doesn’t say he’s sorry. He probably should. He’s not sure he really knows how, and he’s not sure Dean would understand even if he could figure out a way to say it.
A truck rumbles by and Dean is solid against Sam’s body, but Sam knows how much of a lie that is. He holds on a little tighter.
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up and looks at the clock. It is six-sixteen. It is Saturday, February the twenty-first, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar and it’s not the endless cycle of Tuesdays that are the problem. He learned how to make Dean say new things, to disrupt him from the day after day of it. It’s not knowing when Tuesday will suddenly become Wednesday.
He and his brother are stuck together with sweat. It’s pretty disgusting. Dean is awake, Sam can tell, but he props himself up on one elbow and watches Dean for a second anyway. His brother squirms slightly and feigns sleep. Sam watches Dean for just another second and then slips out of bed and goes into his morning routine. Sam does pushups and sit-ups and squats and other calisthenics until his muscles ache. He showers, washes his hair, shaves, gets dressed and goes for coffee.
The good weather is gone. It’s bucketing rain down outside, a veritable deluge and Sam turns the collar of his coat up as he jogs to the car. It’s going to take forever, everyone drives like a total asshole in the rain.
“Hey,” he says to the first guy he sees coming out of Starbucks, little red cup in hand. “Can I have that?” The guy looks at him like he’s lost his mind. Sam grins awkwardly at him. “Never mind,” he says. “Just a…never mind.”
He calls Ruby while he’s in line for coffee.
“Not today,” he says. “I’ll call you as soon as we’ve got rid of this ghost. One grande coffee, one grande mocha, two extra shots of espresso and whipped cream.” Dean will bitch but he’ll drink it and like it. “Yeah, yeah, gimme a call when you can. Thanks, keep the change. Okay, Ruby, good luck.”
It’s part of the routine.
*~*~*
It’s not a ghost, it’s a harpy and its claws tear up Dean’s shoulder and back before they kill it. Sam douses the cuts in holy water and iodine and alcohol and stitches up his brother’s skin while Dean swears through clenched teeth and drinks too much whiskey. He went down in the mud and he tore the cuts wide open beating the harpy back with the butt of his shotgun. Sam was pretty sure there were very specific ways to kill a harpy, but Dean got up, and beat the thing into a bloody pulp. Then they used the special knife and the Latin and set the corpse on fire just to be sure. Dean’s pale from blood-loss and he’s not as happy as he usually is about the end of a hunt.
“That was pretty easy, right?” Dean says, slurred, as Sam bandages up his back and shoulder. “I took that bitch out no problem.”
“Yeah, Dean,” Sam says. “Sure. Except for the part where I’m stitching your back up, it went great.” If the harpy’s claws had gone a little deeper, if the cuts had run a little longer. If she’d raked him from the front. Sam knows what the inside of Dean’s body looks like. He’s seen it more than once. Sam swallows down bile. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“’S nothing,” Dean says. “Just a scratch. I’ll be good to go tomorrow, you don’t need to worry.”
“You should have waited!” Sam says. “I was right behind you, you didn’t need to rush in there like an idiot. Taking that thing on by yourself…You had nothing in that gun but rocksalt. What the hell were you thinking?”
Dean blinks at him. “Just a harpy,” he says, insistent. “Nothin’ I can’t handle.”
Sam gives up and goes and washes Dean’s blood off his hands. “Just go to sleep,” he snaps.
Dean doesn’t get up in the middle of the night, that night, but whatever relief Sam had is gone in the morning when Dean is hot with fever and he’s sweated the bed sheets translucent. The stitches are swollen and infected. Sam has to fill the bathtub with ice and put Dean in it while Dean, eyes fever-bright and tracking things that aren’t there, begs him to stop.
“I said I would do it,” Dean says. “I know what to do, you won’t be disappointed.”
He calls for Sam, repeats his name like a mantra and Sam holds his head between his hands and tries to make Dean see him. “Don’t take his face,” Dean says. “Don’t you fucking take his face.”
Sam pushes him down so nothing but his nose and mouth are out of the water and watches the ice melt as his hands go numb.
“I know what you want,” Dean says, when Sam has let him up, just a little because his hands hurt and Dean’s not struggling any more. Sam isn’t sure if Dean’s crying or laughing because his teeth are chattering so hard. Despite the harsh light of the bathroom his pupils are dilated so wide his eyes are almost completely black. “I’ll bring you Ruby back,” he says, low and almost flirtatious, “I’ll bring you her, and I know a girl who can hear angels talking. Let me out and I’ll bring you them both. He’s not a threat to Lilith, tell her that.” Sam tips more ice into the bathtub and eases Dean back down, cupping the freezing water and running it over Dean’s head. “You’re a liar,” Dean says. “No matter what he learns, even if he could crack her in two, he wouldn’t do this to me, I know you, I know what you really are.”
“Christo,” Sam says, and is honestly surprised that neither of them flinch.
*~*~*
On the second day, when Dean is still delirious and feverish, Sam draws chalk patterns on the ugly green carpet and summons Castiel.
No one comes.
He calls Ruby and gets nothing. Sam scrubs the carpet clean and draws different circles, lights different candles and summons Ruby.
She still doesn’t come.
Sam wraps Dean in icepacks and drives him to the hospital where he sits in an uncomfortable plastic chair and waits to find out if modern medicine and science will come through where both heaven and hell failed. He can think of a dozen philosophers who would find this funny.
Dean’s fever breaks in the night and the doctors tell Sam that it was touch and go but he’s out of the woods now. So long as he takes the full course of antibiotics he should be back to his usual self in no time. Sam falls asleep approximately five minutes later, still sitting in the uncomfortable plastic chair next to Dean’s bed, holding his sweaty hand.
On the third day while Dean is sleeping, Sam decides that he’s wasted too much time reacting instead of acting. And he’s really tired of things trying to take Dean away from him again. He’s aware that he’s starting to sound a little like a crazy person, but he figures it doesn’t matter so much since everything else around them is even stranger. Besides, it seems a little late to start worrying about that now. He’s pretty sure the tipping point was back on that Tuesday, or maybe it was Wednesday. Maybe it was the day Dean died for him, or the day John died for Dean.
Either way, they need to get a move on.
He thought he heard the words, “Mother really likes the show,” and “America’s Most Wanted,” out in the hallway. It’s not that Sam’s paranoid, it’s just that he’s sure there’s someone from the FBI watching them still. Some suit who saw the holes in the story and has their file sitting on his desk, while his friends tell him to give it up, that the Winchesters are finally dead, to let it go. Sam may or may not picture this guy as owning a fedora and a trenchcoat. But that’s not important. It is plausible, very possible in fact, that if they get sloppy, the FBI will pick them up again. Dean’s died once before, they had his body in their custody, escaping an explosion wouldn’t be so difficult. Sam is pretty sure that prison wouldn’t be a good place to prepare for an apocalypse. Plus, they don’t let family members share cells. Not that Sam’s thought this through.
Dean opens his eyes and mumbles, “You look like a foot.” He’s pale and exhausted-looking, but he’s awake.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Sam says, pretty sure he’s got the stupidest grin on his face. Dean tries to take his hand back, but Sam ignores him and keeps holding on. “C’mon, we’re getting the fuck out of here.”
He’s got nurse’s scrubs on and Dean’s in a wheelchair when one of the real staff stops Sam. “Mr. Lee,” she says, recognizing him. Kelly, Sam thinks her name is. She was the one who brought him coffee and a blanket that first night. She sounds confused and worried. “What are you doing?”
It doesn’t look good, Sam’s willing to admit that.
“Mr. Lee, your brother needs medical attention, please.” She’s short, maybe five three, probably less, and she’s a little overweight, hundred and forty, hundred and fifty. Sam really doesn’t want to have to hurt her. He doesn’t even want to have to frighten her, she was nice to him.
“Mr. Lee,” Kelly says firmly even though she looks scared. “I’m going to have to ask you to please come with me, so we can get your brother back to his room, or I’m going to call the police.”
Dean starts trying to get to his feet and Sam puts a hand on his shoulder and presses him back down. “You don’t want to call the police,” Sam says. He meant it to come out threatening, he’s a big guy, she’s afraid of him and that’s an advantage right now, even if their cover is so totally blown. It comes out a little different than he thought it was going to.
Her eyes get wide and unblinking. “No,” she says.
“You’re going to go back to work.”
“Yes,” she says and tears start slipping down her face. She isn’t pretty when she cries. A blotchy pink is rising into her cheeks and her nose starts to run. Sam’s pretty sure he’s hurting her.
“You aren’t ever going to talk about what happened here, are you? Not to anyone. Not even to write it down.”
“No,” Kelly says.
Sam leans over the nurse’s station and pulls a Kleenex out of the box. He presses it into her hand and starts walking again, pushing Dean out towards the exit. He doesn’t look back.
They peel out of town, Dean lying across the backseat, still in his hospital gown, blankets from their latest motel wrapped around him. Sam drives, one hand tight around the wheel, rear-view angled down so he can watch Dean. He’s pretty sure it’s illegal to talk on the phone in this state while you’re driving, but it’s against the law to do a lot of the things he does, and if they pull him over Sam figures that’s their problem, not his.
“Ruby,” he says. “I did it. Call me back when you get this.”
Dean is furious and silent. He’d started yelling the second they got into the car, and when Sam had told him to shut up, he’d said, “you gonna make me, Sammy?” and Sam said, “I might,” and Dean had looked at him like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to shout at him or cry again and shut up without another word. Sam’s hoping it’s the drugs still in Dean’s system because he never wants Dean to look at him like that. He never used to. Sam kind of blames their dad, and he kind of blames the angels. All these people, all these things trying to turn them against each other. Sam’ll be damned before that happens.
A couple hundred miles out of the city and Dean says, “Sammy.” He sounds tired. Sam decides they’ll stop once they’re a couple of states over, somewhere where they can regroup. “How long?” Dean asks.
“Just today,” Sam says. “Half of these things I can only do when I’m trying to save you.”
Dean goes very quiet and Sam thinks he’s fallen asleep, the rumble of the engine and CCR turned down low as good as a lullaby. “You ever think…Look, Sam…” he pushes himself into a sitting position, leaning over the seat so he can talk to Sam properly. “Ruby’s been so gung-ho to get you to use your powers, right? Said she couldn’t save me, but started teaching you to use them to kill Lilith the second I was…”
“Yeah,” Sam says. It’s not like Dean to actually want to talk about this stuff. In the mirror Dean’s still too pale and his eyes are red-rimmed, his lips chapped.
“You ever think that maybe whatever it is she wants, maybe they’ve been using me to get you to do it? We know she’s not working for Lilith, but…there’re a lot of demons, maybe some of them want different things. Like that one you shot in the basement, with the priest.”
Sam turns his head so he can look at Dean properly. The road is straight and mostly empty. The hospital gown shows a line of skin from the nape of Dean’s neck, down his back, over the bandage, down to the dip at the base of his spine, then falls open, spread over one leg.
“Eyes on the freaking road,” Dean says, flicking Sam’s ear.
“Maybe,” Sam says. If Ruby tries to double-cross him, not that he thinks she will, but if she does, he’ll rip her out of coma-girl and send her to hell and she knows it. She won’t double-cross him. The more she teaches him the less leverage she has to play them. Sam’s content to wait that one out. He still has Lilith’s pint-sized head to rip off her neck. “I think the FBI’s gonna be on us again,” he says, to distract his brother.
Dean flicks Sam’s ear again. “You shouldn’t have taken me to the hospital,” he says.
They’re going ninety-five miles an hour and Sam doesn’t slam the breaks on, but it’s near enough. The car fishtails and comes to a stop on the hard shoulder. He kneels up on the seat, hunched over facing backwards and fists his hands in the front of the hospital gown. “You could have died,” he snarls. “Again.”
“Dude,” Dean says, hands light on Sam’s wrists, “quit over-reacting.”
“I am not over-reacting,” Sam says. “Just listen to me for thirty seconds.”
Dean’s eyes are wide and unblinking. Sam watches as his eyes start to water and tears spill down his face. “Sam,” Dean says, low and pained.
It takes every ounce of self-control Sam has not to say something stupid that he’ll regret later. He only does it to save Dean. “Never mind,” Sam says and Dean sags a little.
The radiator in the car clicks and a mini-van passes them. Sam lets go of the hospital gown and Dean pulls the ends a little more closed at the back.
“I thought we could go to Texas,” Sam says.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Okay.”
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up and looks at the clock. It is seven-twenty-three. It is Wednesday.
It is Wednesday, March the fourth, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. He can hear water running, and Dean isn’t in his bed. Sam sits up, shoving the blankets off himself as Dean comes out of the shower.
“You’re up early,” Sam says, trying to pretend he’s not just standing in the middle of the room like an idiot.
Dean hitches his towel up but Sam can’t take his eyes off the scar on his shoulder. It’s flushed with blood and bright against his skin. The red right hand. “Figured since I’m finally up, I could get breakfast,” Dean says.
Sam’s routine is totally thrown off. It’s Wednesday. He can’t lose his routine on a Wednesday.
Sam watches Dean for a second and Dean’s shoulders go up just a little, uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “It’s not a big deal, I’ll get breakfast, you shower, we’ll hit the road…” Dean reaches out and awkwardly pats Sam on the arm. “Okay, Sammy?” he says. “Sam.”
For just a second, when Dean’s hand is touching Sam’s skin, Sam is overwhelmed with the impression of noise. When Dean turns away to get dressed, Sam’s brain begins to work out what it was. Usefulicanbeusefuluselessworthsomethingicanbegoodicanbeicanbefasterstrongersmarterbetterworthlessnotworthless
Sam feels like his heart is trying to kick out of his chest. Fucking Wednesdays.
What he wants to say is: “You’re not going fucking anywhere without me,” and while Dean’s been resting and watching day-time TV, Sam’s been out on the town with Ruby, making people do what he says. But that would be a bad idea for a number of reasons. One, he’s gone down that road before, and it’s not a healthy one. Two, people don’t like to do what Sam says, not like Andy. Until Sam’s learned to ease up a bit, he’s pretty sure that what he does really doesn’t feel good for the person he’s doing it to. Three, the last thing he wants is Dean freaking out on him again. “Thanks,” he says instead, though it comes out like a croak. “Coffee would be good.”
He stands under the shower, one hand on the tiles, one hand on his dick, trying to jerk off. He’s trying for the numbing random images and the white noise of orgasm. He’s half hard from friction but his brain keeps looping back to Dean.
Dean who doesn’t know him any more. The wretched loop of Dean’s thoughts. Dean who has locked down again because of the stupid shit Sam said to him. Jesus Christ can he read minds now? Dean in the bathtub who thought he was Alastair. Dean dying. Dean dying. Dean dying.
Sam gives up on trying to jerk off.
He washes his hair. He shaves. His hands are steady even though they feel like they ought to be shaking.
Castiel is standing a little too close to the bathroom door when Sam comes out of his shower and the angel gets a faceful of steam. Sam absolutely does not gut-reaction slam Castiel up against the wall with an arm over his throat, losing his towel in the process before realizing who it is.
“Sorry,” Sam mutters, putting his towel back on. “Dean’s out.”
Castiel looks at the motel room. “I can see that,” he says. “You summoned me?”
Sam pulls boxers on because it’s weird talking to an angel in a towel. “That was over a week ago!” Sam says. They’re in Texas, in a town with a population of under a thousand, letting Dean finish healing in the sunshine. “Dean nearly died.”
“He didn’t and I was busy,” Castiel says. “And I find your arrogance annoying. What do you want?”
“I’m not the anti-Christ, am I?” Sam asks.
Castiel’s shoulders move in a way that isn’t a shrug. It’s more like he’s settling something that isn’t visible. “Probably not,” he says with his odd little half-smile. “That would make this, as Dean says, awkward.”
Sam barks out a laugh. “Anyone ever tell you you’re lousy at reassuring people?” He puts on jeans and a t-shirt too because it’s also weird talking to an angel in your underwear. Sam sighs and turns back to look at Castiel again. “You’re not going to put my brother back in the Pit,” Sam says, “not really.”
“I could,” Castiel says, but he looks a little cagey.
He’s a lot taller than Castiel, a lot broader in the shoulder, and he uses that, gets up into Castiel’s space, just a little. Smiles at the angel like they’re friends. Castiel is no Anna, but he’s no Uriel either and Sam kind of knows what that’s like, this indecision, this ledge to fall from. He’s not who he was and he’s not the Boy King either, but falling is a lot easier than the alternatives and say what you will about the darkside, but it takes care of its business. He thinks Castiel knows that too.
“Yeah,” Sam says, “but you’re not going to.” Sam steps back and returns to tidying up. “Dean was wrong, you’re not ‘junkless’ are you? I mean, you inhabit human bodies, for one.”
Now Castiel just looks confused. “What does that have to do with Hell?”
“Says in the Bible that angels had sex with humans,” Sam says, not answering the question. See how Castiel likes it when other people refuse to give a straight answer.
“Some,” Castiel says. “A long time ago.”
“I didn’t figure you had,” Sam says. “I’ve worn polyester. So what’s up with all that other stuff?”
Castiel blinks at him. “What?” he says.
Sam shrugs and pretends like his heart isn’t about to jackhammer out of his chest. “If I have sex with Dean, are you going to punish him for it?”
It’s out now and Sam thought it would be easier to breathe once he’d said it, but it’s worse, if anything. Castiel tips his head to one side and really looks at Sam. “Oh,” he says. “That.”
Sam didn’t think there could be anything more embarrassing than Dean giving him The Talk when he was twelve. Then he’d had co-ed sex education when he was thirteen and he thought that was as bad as it could get. Until John tried to give him The Talk when he was fifteen and he’d already started fooling around with one of the girls in his homeroom, and with Dean. He thought there really couldn’t be anything much worse than that. Until he tried to have The Talk with a freaking angel.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “That.”
He doesn’t know what the angels see when they look at him, with his selfishness, and his demon blood, and his psychic powers, and this love for his brother that is wrapped around his bones, that is hooked into every organ and won’t let go. He used to think it was like cancer, or a parasite inside him, but that’s not right. It’s not foreign, it’s not wrong. It’s just…
He doesn’t think the angels could like him much less. He’s not sure he blames them any more. It’s not in their nature to understand things, they don’t have questions to begin with.
Now that he knows what’s out there and what he can do, Sam wonders what would happen if Castiel did throw Dean back into the Pit, or if some case gone wrong took Dean from him and he wound up back there. The thing inside him that loves Dean too much wonders if the next time he loses Dean he might not go further than a soul for a soul. If Hell won’t trade with him, and Heaven won’t have him and he can’t, he can’t lose Dean again…
Forty years already, forty years and they had Dean off the rack and on his way to becoming one of them. Sam wonders how well his powers would work on angels. If maybe he could make deals with them. If he could rip them out of their hosts and send them back to Heaven. He wonders what happens if you learn to pull their Grace right out of them, if you can saw off their wings and make them fall.
He wonders if that’s what Castiel means when he said, “Probably not,” if this is all just some sort of fucked up lynchpin.
“Incest,” Sam prompts, when Castiel doesn’t say anything. “Gay incest. How’s that sit with you and the man upstairs?”
Castiel sighs. “Samuel,” he says. “There are more important things at stake here.”
“Yes or no,” Sam snaps. “Can’t you just answer the fucking question? Or would that spoil it for you?”
“You are very much your father’s son,” Castiel says and Sam can’t tell if he’s talking about John or about Azazael. He sighs again. “I never met it, but there are others who remember before it started to question. When God loved Lucifer the most, before the Fall. Love that divides and breaks everything around it.”
“Yes or no,” Sam says, stubborn.
“We aren’t made for that kind of love. We know other kinds, but not like what humans know. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that’s what the Accuser found.” Castiel looks away, looks regretful and tired all of a sudden. “Go to your brother, if you want. I would not punish either of you for that.”
Sam sits down hard on the bed and starts to laugh. “Don’t use my powers to save people, but I can fuck my brother?” he chokes out. “You have some screwed up priorities, you know that?”
The door opens and Dean stands in the doorway with a McDonalds bag tucked under his arm, juggling it and a tray of coffee, and the key to the room. Castiel is gone and Sam is sitting on his own, laughing.
“You okay?” Dean asks, toeing the door shut behind him. He puts their breakfast down on the table and hovers. “Seriously, man, what’s up?”
Sam looks up at Dean, then gets up and crowds his brother up against the off-white of the motel wall and kisses him. Dean’s eyes get wide and startled and he jerks against Sam’s body. They don’t do this. But Sam wants it with everything possessive, jealous, and too used to getting his own way he has in him. And he wants it with all the helpless love he has for the older brother who carried him out of two fires, and tried so hard to raise him, and loves him back even at the worst of times.
Dean turns his face away and Sam catches his head between his hands and makes him look. “Say no because you mean it,” Sam says. “Because I’ve already cleared it with Castiel.”
“No,” Dean says and walks right back out the door again.
Sam hears the engine start and the slight skid and screech of tyres as Dean drives off too fast. He’ll be back. Maybe Sam will even have stopped laughing by then.
*~*~*
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Tuesday
Sam wakes up on a Wednesday.
Sam wakes up and looks at the clock. It is five thirty-eight in the morning. It is Thursday the fifth of March, the year two thousand and nine A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. Sam is alone in the motel room, but he can hear the rumble of the Impala outside, and the light beaming through the thin curtains cuts off at the same time as the engine.
Dean comes in, shoulders up, head down and looks at Sam sideways, hovering near the door. He waits until Sam’s sat up to speak, but still won’t look at him properly. “You never wanted that before,” he says.
Sam puts his bare feet on the floor, elbows on his knees. Non-threatening. It’s dark in the room except for the light coming through the curtains from the neon sign of the motel and the lone streetlight. “Says who?” Sam keeps his voice quiet. “And what does that matter anyway?”
“You didn’t,” Dean insists.
“I was a teenager,” Sam says and carries right on over Dean’s wince, “of course I wanted more. But what that has to do with us, now, I don’t get. This isn’t a sign of anything, Dean. This is just….”
“This is just fucked up,” Dean says, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “You know it is.”
Sam stands up and this time Dean doesn’t move. “Castiel didn’t think so,” Sam points out. Love that divides and breaks everything around it, Castiel said. And maybe Sam should be steering clear of sympathy for the devil, but it’s not like everyone hasn’t already picked sides and Sam can think of a few things he’d like to break.
“Yeah, well,” Dean says. “You can’t tell me it’s a good idea.”
“What are you scared of?” Sam asks and okay, maybe he does deserve to be laughed at then. Dean stops though when Sam crosses the room to stand in front of him.
Dean takes Sam’s face in his hands and kisses him hesitantly. Not exactly like Sam would expect his brother to kiss someone, unless that someone was your first girlfriend when you were thirteen and you had strict Christian parents and...It’s pretty feeble, is what Sam’s saying. “You don’t have to save me,” Dean says. “I’m right here.”
Sam puts one hand on Dean’s jaw and kisses him properly, licking into his mouth, and Dean gets with the program. He tastes like whiskey and Sam can hear Usefulicanbeusefuluselessworthsomethingicanbegoodicanstopthisicansaveusicanbeworthlessnotworthless
There is every chance that Dean is giving Sam this out of some misguided attempt to save Sam from the Dark Side. Or because he thinks Castiel told him to. Or because of some other insane ass-backwards logic. Sam doesn’t think so though.
And when Dean’s kneeling astride Sam, squirming on his dick while Sam holds him still, just rocking up into him, slow, and Dean’s cursing, sweat-slippery and panting, Sam hears something different in Dean’s head. Mostly it’s his name, and Sam doesn’t get thoughts, not really, just impressions. It’s an overwhelming mix of devotion, love and the feeling of getting fucked, hard.
“Fuck,” Sam says and urges Dean into motion again, shoving his hips up as Dean rides him. “Jesus, Dean, that’s good.”
Dean lights up, just a little, the hum of his thoughts still on a loop, but it’s an oddly peaceful one, not the depressing feedback Sam was picking up before. If he’s feeling a little smug about his own abilities in bed, Sam figures that’s okay. If he’d known how easily so many of their problems could be solved this way, he would have had Dean bent over the nearest surface the first day he came back from Hell.
*~*~*
Sam has a really weird dream about being on a pirate ship with the cast of Fraggle Rock and wakes up feeling disorientated.
Dean sits propped up in bed eating Doritos, getting crumbs everywhere, including on Sam, which wouldn’t be the case if he would chew with his mouth a little more shut. He takes another sip of the beer in his hand and licks his fingers clean before tossing the empty bag of chips towards the garbage can. His aim is shot from not really caring and not really looking, so of course he misses and it winds up on the floor, but there are already takeout containers there to keep it company.
In contrast, Dean’s clothes are neatly folded on the old wingback chair with one wobbly leg and rat-chewed upholstery and his guns have already been cleaned and put away again. There’s a smear of orange powder at the corner of Dean’s mouth and Sam wonders how long it will be there before Dean wipes it away. He surreptitiously checks the clock on the nightstand. It says 5:11 and Sam is fairly certain that it’s not five anything, am or pm but it flips over to 5:12 and he figures he can still time Dean’s reaction. He thinks it’s more like ten in the morning. Maybe noon. The ratty brown curtains are still drawn, which makes it hard to tell.
Dean sets the bottle down too, drained to a thin rim of foam at the very bottom. There’s half a sixpack empted out already. Sam decides to make Dean’s drinking his next project. It can go hand in hand with him making his brother a happier person with the power of his dick. It’s like winning all the little arguments they’ve had these past few weeks all at once. Sam yawns contentedly and stretches, back popping. He feels awesome. Still a little rubbery around the knees, but pretty awesome. It’s really hard not to look as smug as he feels.
“So,” Dean says, wiping his fingers on the thin, bluish sheets. “We should probably pick up a newspaper, or something.”
Sam scratches his stomach and stares up at the water-stain on the ceiling. It’s shaped a little like Montana. “You still need to rest,” he says. Especially since they were rough on his cuts and one of them seeped a little blood. “We should stay here for a few days at least.” The motel they’re holed up in is kind of a roach trap but the bed has a decent enough mattress, and there’s a shitty bar and a halfway decent diner across the street.
Dean’s face closes up and his shoulders tense and for a second Sam feels like Dean is all the way across the room, even though they’re hip to hip, naked in the same bed. “Come on, Sam, people to save, monsters to kill,” Dean says, casually, like it doesn’t matter. Sam puts his hand on Dean’s thigh, high up where he can feel Dean’s pulse.
“Dude,” Dean says, head dropping back, smirking. There’s no way Dean’s getting it up again, not so soon after last time, but Sam needs a few days to regroup before he can think about what the heck they’re going to do now. Exactly how they’re going to finish the crap that everyone else started. He slides Dean down the bed, onto his back and hooks Dean’s leg over his arm so he can push three fingers into him. They go easily, riding on lube and come and Dean shudders and groans, clutching at Sam’s shoulder.
“Jesus Christ, Sammy,” Dean says and the next sound out of his mouth is an honest-to-god whimper that Sam decides he won’t rib Dean about later. It’s the easiest way Sam can think of to distract Dean and just because Dean can’t get it up right now doesn’t mean that Sam’s not willing to give it the old college try. He twists his fingers and Dean shudders again, biting at his lips.
Sam doesn’t want Dean thinking about demons or ghosts or any other thing, just him, just them. He licks the smear of orange off Dean’s face and thinks, abruptly irritated, that Heaven and Hell can have someone else. Someone who the world doesn’t need. Someone who isn’t his. Dean isn’t anyone’s pawn, and he doesn’t appreciate people trying to fuck with them.
Sam falls asleep after and he dreams of demons, nothing but demons as far as he can see and Dean’s eyes the only colour for miles around. Dean blinks black and Sam wakes up gasping for breath with his face mashed into a pillow that smells like sweat and Dean’s spit and he just knows he’s going to have lines on his face. There’s something warm resting on his back, over the scar, and he realizes Dean’s already up, propped back against the headboard, one hand on Sam. He has a newspaper in his lap and a red pen that he’s tapping on his teeth with his other hand. There are three obituaries and a missing persons ad circled. It’s around four-thirty, in time to grab what’s either a really late lunch or a really early dinner.
“Hey,” Dean says as Sam sits up. Sam thinks he sounds pretty chipper for a guy who, a few hours ago, couldn’t say anything but his brother’s name, and only that in fucked out whimpers. He thinks Dean might be sitting funny, but it’s not much consolation. “I think I found a few leads,” Dean says. He’s showered, shaved, dressed…he even has socks on. “Looks like a werewolf in Oregon or an undine in Florida.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, though he doesn’t mean it. “Okay. Oregon.” If they can figure out who the werewolf is, they can take it out while it’s human, then Sam won’t have to worry about anyone getting infected, or hurt. Plus, no risk of drowning or being eaten by an alligator, or a misplaced golf-ball from some old codger hitting Dean in the wrong place…
He’s going to need a new routine, Sam thinks. Just something that can tide them over until he kills Lilith.
End.
*~*~*
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire,
Belike through impotence or unaware,
To give his enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger whom his anger saves
To punish endless? 'Wherefore cease we, then?'
Say they who counsel war; 'we are decreed,
Reserved, and destined to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse?' Is this, then, worst--
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
What when we fled amain, pursued and struck
With Heaven's afflicting thunder, and besought
The Deep to shelter us? This Hell then seemed
A refuge from those wounds. Or when we lay
Chained on the burning lake? That sure was worse.
What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,
Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage,
And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us?
- Paradise Lost Book II